Deeplinks

In towns across Turkey this Sunday, thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest proposed new Internet filters. Beginning in August, Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority, or BTK, has proposed a selection of opt-in filters that Internet subscribers could choose from. Additionally, BTK has proposed a list of banned words for use in domain names.

Network censorship and surveillance is a booming business. Censorship schemes continue to fragment the Internet and new censorship proposals are constantly introduced around the world, including in liberal democracies. (Lately governments have gotten fascinated by the idea of forcing ISPs to censor particular sites from the DNS, so users can't find them even though the sites are still there.) Censors usually assume that most Internet users don't know how to bypass the censorship (or, often, that many users won't even realize the censorship is going on!).

In an ongoing battle in the Southern District of New York about whether the government must disclose metadata when it releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act, it now appears Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may have lied in a declaration it filed with the court. This comes on the heels of our earlier report about the FBI lying in a FOIA case in California and does not instill confidence that the government is acting honestly or ethically in FOIA litigation.

Peabody Energy is at it again, trying to stifle critical speech intended to call attention to the company's practices. Last year, Peabody tried to intimidate a website that spoofed the Peabody-sponsored "Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization (CCCU)." This week, Peabody targeted a website that focused on concerns about the impact of Peabody's activities on children's health. The site ostensibly had Peabody offer a free inhaler to any family living within 200 miles of a coal plant, stating:

When governments and companies assemble on an international level to discuss "Internet freedom," EFF's policy experts go on alert. All too frequently, government-level discussions about Internet freedom turn into opportunities to discuss tangential issues, many of which have negative implications on online freedom: laws and policies promoting censorship and surveillance on the Internet. With that in mind, EFF attended the Council of Europe (CoE) meeting on Internet Freedom: From Principles to Global Treaty Law? to ensure that European countries’ fundamental values--human rights, democracy and the rule of law--are upheld. EFF went in prepared to fight any attempt to promote pervasive spying proposals or government attempts to control the Internet. The Council of Europe largely succeeded in fostering a positive, rights-centered tone at the meeting.

Update: An official Senate version of the draft PROTECT IP Act has been released and is available here. This version changes the “interactive computer services” language mentioned in our post below to “information location tools,” a term that points back to section 512(d) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In that context it’s been generally understood to refer to search engines, though there’s no guarantee we wouldn’t see efforts to expand the definition in actions under this bill. But in any case, requiring search engines to remove links to an entire website raises serious First Amendment concerns considering the lawful expression that may be hosted on the same domain.

Earlier this month the FBI, DEA and the Department of Justice Criminal Division responded to our FOIA litigation for records related to the Department of Justice’s controversialefforts to push Congress to expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

EFF is thrilled to announce the newest member of our international team, Jillian York. Jillian is the Director for International Freedom of Expression -- an always-critical issue that has come into sharp relief over the last few months with the events in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and beyond.